Opinion

Go on. Sip your tea, wear funny hats, shoulder muskets, and carry placards with hateful slogans, because you and your ideas belong with the flintlock era. Once again, I salute you farewell and wish you and your ilk good riddance.

You can't change the facts of an explosion. A large fertilizer factory operated next to homes, a middle school and a nursing home. The factory blew, and 14 people died. We can't change those facts, but it's up to us to decide what they mean.

Terrorism is a real concern in our era. An attack on a major public festivity like the Boston Marathon is not trivial. Still, the question remains: Should the nation allow its consciousness to be so dominated by every terrorist attack?

Too many Americans are unaware of the extreme disparities that have been caused by the unregulated profit incentive of capitalism. Our winner-take-all system is flailing away at once-healthy parts of society, leaving them like withered limbs on a trembling body.

The Boston bombing has jarred my memories of living in London in the early '90s. It's a cliche to say that people are resilient, that they shrug off terrorism and get on with their lives, but there is much truth to that nonetheless.

So far, the much-dreaded “sequester” — some $85 billion in federal spending cuts between March and September 30 — hasn’t been evident to most Americans. Take a closer look, though, and Americans are starting to feel the pain. They just don’t know it yet.

The nonpartisan Pew Research Center has released a new survey that speaks for itself: "For the first time in more than four decades of polling, a majority of Americans favor legalizing the use of marijuana."

Multinational corporations have built their businesses on the backs of American taxpayers. Yet they've turned around and mocked us with declining tax payments, low wages and dwindling retirement support.

I can think of nothing that could unify our country and allies more than an attack by North Korea against democratic South Korea—especially among international economic powerhouses South Korea and Japan.